Friday, October 11, 2013

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Shotcut recently received a major technology upgrade of some of its components. For the technical folks, it has been upgraded to Qt 5! This will make it faster and easier to develop filter control panels and the forthcoming timeline. You see, the engine for Shotcut - MLT - has hundreds of audio and video filters available. After making a few in Shotcut it became obvious we did not want to keep making them using the traditional method. In addition:

extended support for high DPI displays such as the Retina MacBook Pro - in particular, for the video viewport

Here comes the "more than skin deep part." While everyone else has been working on getting video into HTML5, we have been working on getting HTML5 into video! The MLT plugin WebVfx uses Qt and WebKit technology - both of which have also been upgraded - to do just that. With this new version of Shotcut, WebVfx is getting more exposure, initially through 2 new filters:

Circular Frame: mainly a proof-of-concept, this demonstrates a filter whose processing is implemented in HTML5 canvas with a user interface implemented in QML to control its parameters.

Overlay HTML: just like it sounds. You can choose a HTML file on the file system and it will be rendered with a transparent background (if not set) over the video. Don't write HTML? There is a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor included. Did I mention it is simple? Feel free to try out some of the new HTML animation tools that are becoming available from Adobe, Google, Sencha, and others.

Unfortunately, we could not get all of this new stuff working correctly on Windows; so we had to disable support for GPU processing and the WebVfx integration on Windows at this time. The last Qt 4 version of Shotcut will remain available for download for a while.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

As of version 13.03.10, there are now several video filters available. Thanks to Movit and MLT, these filters run on the GPU using OpenGL Shading Language for speedy, high quality, 16-bit (per color component) linear float processing! There are also some CPU-based ones (8-bit integer with gamma); you switch between them by using the GPU Processing option in the Settings menu. This provides a convenient way to compare them. The GPU filter processing even works in conjunction with simultaneous SDI/HDI monitoring. Also, it works for background encoding jobs. The screenshot on the Shotcut homepage has been updated. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that with the GPU-powered Color Grading filter, we now offer 3 way color wheels. :-)